Online Bass Lessons: Learn Without Adquiring Bad Practice Habits

by Juju Robles on July 12, 2009

Playing the guitar is one popular pastime nowadays. For some people, it is also a way of expressing themselves and elevates the hobby into an art form or sometimes, science. Playing the guitar, however, is no joke. It requires a lot of patience and practice. For some people, they would rather study playing the bass guitar than the regular guitar. Here are some tips on learning to play the bass guitar.

Tune all your strings one by one by matching the sound of the strings to the corresponding note on your tuner. Tuning your bass is not hard. But as with any other instrument it involves practice,and of course, practice makes perfect. After a while you may find that you do not even have to rely on an electronic tuner to tune your bass.

The bass student will find more reward in learning the varied methods, namings, visualizing and thinking of chord, scale, and arpeggio patterns on the fretboard. In some ways, the differences are minor, but often they can be very obvious and the benefit of learning them can easily result in transitioning around the fretboard easily.

A simpler setup would be to connect your bass guitar to the input of a direct injection box, which offers a different, rounder character compared to the crisp sound that you get from micing up a bass amplifier. There are a multitude of active and passive DI boxes to choose from, so try them out at the local guitar shop to see which one appeals to you the most.

It can be played by plucking, slapping, tapping, popping, or by picking the strings with a pick. The bass guitar looks somewhat similar to an electric guitar, but with a larger, heavier body, a longer scale length, and a longer neck. The bass guitar usually has four strings, tuned one octave lower in pitch than the four lower strings of a guitar.

When you hear the term learn slap bass, what it refers to is learning how to play certain techniques on the bass guitar. No matter what the other instruments in a band sound like, the bass guitar is crucial and is really the glue that holds the whole thing together. Slap bass is a way of playing the bass guitar.

Also, crucial to slap bass is the “snapping” sound produced by pulling the strings up and letting them snap back onto the fretboard - this is called “popping”. Of course, all the other more usual techniques of bass playing are still used, such as hammer-ons and crosshammers, lift-offs, slides, string bends and harmonics - but rather than plucking the string with the finger or pick, it might be slapped with the thumb or popped.

A bass guitarist/bassist is like the anchor of a band. He/she outlines the harmony of the music being performed, while simultaneously indicating the rhythmic pulse of it. The bass guitarist is like the lifeblood of any band, and the bass guitar is his/her tool of choice, used to mesmerize audiences. A bass guitar is a bass stringed instrument that is played with the fingers.

About the Author:

Technorati Tags: bass, business, computers, education, entertainment, family, hobbies, information, instruction, internet, lessons, online, review, Software